Culture Flash!
A new theatre company gets Broadway vets to teach teens in Austin, and an older one gets a new artistic director and a new name
By Robert Faires, Fri., May 30, 2008
The [Coda] Theater Project has a new artistic director and a new name. The young independent company, which was launched in 2002 to develop multidisciplinary and collaborative theatrical projects and produced regularly for three seasons, went missing in action after its staging of Kafka's Dick in April 2007. But it resurfaced last week with the news that it has hired UT Department of Theatre & Dance graduate Dustin Wills to lead the company and, to reflect the new direction for the company, is changing its name to Tutto Theatre Company, "tutto" being Italian for "everything." Wills, who won an Austin Critics Table Award in 2006 for his direction of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, traveled to Italy last year and staged three of his own pieces at the English Theatre of Rome. Since his return to Austin, he has directed the world premiere of Eve Tulbert's Ashes, Ashes for the UT theatre department and served as assistant director to Ann Ciccolella on the Austin Shakespeare production of Much Ado About Nothing this spring. He also works with Theatre Action Project. Wills' first production with Tutto will be a new staging of Ophelia, a play he wrote that premiered in the 2005 David Mark Cohen New Works Festival at UT and for which he received the George H. Mitchell Award. That production is tentatively set for October of this year and will be followed by a new work, Varietà, in April 2009. For more information, visit www.tuttotheatre.org.